The Judge gave a silent “ah” and waved spidery fingers.
“I cannot. You are marked by the bargain with the Turnbulls, and that will call to the Boars as long as the debt is not paid. I do sympathize.” He inspected the Boars guarding the dais delicately. “Yes, I would not wish for such… crude companions, myself.”
The Boars stiffened at the insult. Emma saw fists clench, shoulders tighten.
The Judge dismissed them with a glance. “But the mark is affixed to your soul: I cannot remove it as long as the contract exists.”
His eyes were glinting.He’s enjoying this,Emma thought.He’s testing me. Fine.
“Then make a second mark,” she fired back. “If you cannot remove the first, or stop the Night City’s officials from hunting me while I bear it. Give me something that will tell the hunters not to harm me when they find me.”
“Such as what?”
“A token of protection, perhaps, my lord?” the Librarian’s voice quavered from the side of the chamber.
“Hmm. They are usually for visiting dignitaries, but that might do. Yes.” His eyes snapped back to her face, and if she hadn’tknown better, she might have thought the quirk to the straight, dry lips was a smile.
“The Night City hereby grants you a token of protection. Any Boar who comes across you will spare you. But the payment owed by the Turnbulls’ bargain will be added to your debt. One mortal soul is equal to one thousand years of service. You may pay it off in any way you choose, but pay you must.”
The buzzing in her ears was applause. It caught like fire across the chamber. Emma was too relieved to notice. She stumbled from the plinth. The Sister’s arm caught her, and Nancy pulled her from the cavern.
CHAPTER 22
Emma sat on the bench of the anteroom in a daze, as green-wigged clerks and mincing courtiers eddied from the judgment chamber. One thousand years.
If it took that long, if she paid off the debt on the final day of the thousandth year, and found a way back to the mortal world, what would it look like? It would not be her world. It would be empty of any who had known her. Her mother would have been buried generations before. And what would she recognize of herself, after centuries of living in the Night City? Emma pictured her kinder feelings worn away, her face wearing the same mask of glittering malice as the audience at the trial. That would be its own kind of death.
The chatter of the anteroom faded back around her, and Emma realized that the red-haired fox maiden—Nancy, she reminded herself—was talking in a soft murmur.
“—so brave as you were. But how’re you ever going to pay off that debt?”
“I’m not going to think about it,” said Emma, more cheerfullythan she felt. “So how long do you have left? Before you get out, I mean.”
“Out?” Nancy looked blank.
“Your years of service? How long until you’re free?”
“Oh, that? I don’t know,” Nancy said, with a listlessness that surprised Emma. She spoke as though it were something she barely thought of, recalled after long effort. “A fair while to go yet, I suppose.”
“You suppose?” Emma couldn’t imagine not keeping track, down to the week. Down to the day.
“The City’ll let me know once I’m through. I don’t like to question.” She ducked her head. “I’m not the same as you. Or the rest of our sisters.”
“What do you mean?”
But the fox maiden leapt to her feet. “There’s the Librarian with your token. Come, let’s go meet him.”
The token was a slip of waxed parchment the length of her thumb. When she saw it, Emma fell silent. She didn’t say a word, not all the way back through the earthen corridors of the Court, not as they climbed up to the tiny chamber with the door to the outer world. There on the parchment, in gleaming black ink, was an eye ringed with monstrous teeth. A shape she had seen once before. When she was mortal.
It should not have made her want to cry. But she remembered that girl, so confident of failing her law tutorials, zipping a piece of paper into her bag and forgetting about it, and wished she had known. Known what it had meant. That someone was watching out for her. That someone cared for her. That she was worth caring for.
“You gave me this symbol,” she said. “The day we met in the Library.”
The Librarian covered her hand with his own crooked, lumpy one. “Mine did not have such power, child. It was but a poor copy. I knew the rune, that is all. I thought it might protect you, with my hope and will worked into it. Would that it had been enough.”
“But how could you know I would need protection?” Emma whispered. “I’d only just met the Turnbulls. Met—Jasper.”
She had spoken his name. A howl echoed in her chest.
